How To Use Instagram Stories To Sell More

Are you utilizing Instagram to promote your business? Hopefully, the answer is yes. Are you posting on your Instagram stories? If you don’t, I suggest you start. There are 500 million people using Instagram stories daily. That scale of engagement offers you a huge opportunity to reach your audience and potential customers. Incorporate stories into your Instagram marketing campaign and see your sales rise.

There is quite a collection of Instagram story features with more debuting all the time. Below is a list of six that you can utilize for your business. Use these features to help better understand your audience, what they like and what they don’t like. Start to implement the use of a few, or try them all, and see how they work for your business.

Questions

The Questions feature can be used in two major ways. The first use is to ask your audience a specific question about something regarding your business or products. Keep in mind that this feature does not allow for long answers, so make sure to ask questions that don’t need a long winded answer from your audience. The second way the Questions feature is useful is to do a Q&A with your customers. This is a great way to create one-on-one connections and to help people get to know you and your brand.

Polls

Using the polls feature on your stories is a really great way to find out what your audience wants. The question can be a simple yes or no question or a “this or that” question to find out their preferences. Knowing what your audience likes or dislikes will help you better create products or services for them that they will be more inclined to like and therefore purchase.

User Tagging & Sharing

A great way to engage with your customer base on Instagram, as well as promote reviews of your brand, is by direct tagging and sharing on your stories. If you have been tagged in a post or story from a customer with a positive review, share it on your stories! Your audience will see your brand out in the real world with real customers and will be more inclined to become customers themselves.

Emoji Slider

Another useful tool to use is the emoji slider feature on stories. This feature can help you determine the exact level of enthusiasm your audience has for a specific thing. Use the slider feature with a simple question such as “How much do you like this?”. You will be able to see at what levels of interest your audience has in the thing you are asking about.

Countdown

The countdown feature can be used in your stories to prepare your customers for an exciting new launch, a special discount, events and more. Create excitement regarding your business using this feature. Your customers also have the option of turning on notifications for when the countdown is over so that even when your story goes away after 24 hours, they can still be reminded of your countdown.

Swipe Up

This feature is only available if you have a business account as well as 10,000 followers. If you are able to use the swipe up feature, it allows for your customers to easily access the link you are promoting directly on your stories. This is a huge benefit for businesses to direct traffic to their website for their customers to access.

Test it Out

With all social media marketing, consistency is key. Just as you are posting regularly to your Instagram account, you should be posting to your Instagram Stories daily. There is no exact science for success when it comes to stories. It is import to test out what works best for your business and the audience that you have. Post consistently, experiment with how many times a day you post, try out the different features and find what your audience responds best to. The more you are interacting with your audience, the more likely you will be to turn them into customers.